A Heart Full of Love – Mollie Wagner

Loving someone and being in love are two totally different things, both equally as destructive. I have never shied away from the idea of love; I have just never uncovered the deepest roots and darkest secrets of the four letter word that drives people absolutely crazy.

I have felt every feeling and said every word, yet I have never learned my lesson. Being in love means believing in it, even when it feels out of reach. I have always been told that I am too young to grasp the concept of love; so I began telling myself that.

When I was 13, I met a girl—I’ll call her the girl on fire because she made my heart engulf in flames when the small edges of her mouth formed into the most breathtaking smile. Stepping back, reality slapped me in the face. First of all, she’s a girl. Second of all, I am too young. Are my feelings invalid? I was in disbelief, unable to pinpoint these feelings and too afraid to speak out loud. I believed in fairytales and happily ever after. I was a victim to long nights stuck in my imaginary bubble of thought.

The girl on fire sat underneath the nose of my parents for almost three years. I believed in her; I believed in everything she made me feel, but I couldn’t fathom my parents believing anything about my fairytale. They wouldn’t just rain on my parade, but storm. I believed that I was too young to love. Too young to understand, too young to feel all of these feelings, and I wanted nothing more but for them to go away.

When my first love vanished, I constantly questioned why this happened to me. Why did I get the brunt of this situation? Why did I fall in love with a girl? Why did I allow her to destroy the most beautiful and unmining feeling there is? Well, because I trusted in love. I lunged at it when I had the chance and I never looked back.

Love is a whirlwind. It drags you through an unforgiving sea and you’re forced to hold onto nothing but yourself, unwillingly. Some people are only given the chance to love once. Sometimes your first love is your lasting love, or a love lost. Love is real, it is out there and it is so worth fighting for. Believe in anything and it will eventually gravitate towards you when you least expect it.

I live my best life every single day with a ton of love in my heart, either friendship wise or intimately. Life is so much more fulfilling when you can walk around with an open arm whenever love is offered. Fighting it, shying away from or denying it will only make it harder for you to understand and accept this overpowering feeling. Don’t fret, when life hands you lemons; hand them back and go pick your own. Love hard, always.

A Heart Full of Disbelief – Mckenna Kalisz

He was the first boy to ever tell me that he loved me. The notification from my phone lit up my face while the three words that he sent me in the text message lit up my heart.

Spoiler alert: it didn’t work out, and by not working out I mean he decided that he didn’t want to love me anymore. Instead of telling me he slipped away, the ‘I love you’ texts still came in every night, but slowly I began to feel like I wasn’t the only girl he was telling that to and then he was gone.

When I was younger I always felt too mature for how young I was. I just didn’t find interest in playing the same games or pulling pranks like everyone else; I didn’t toss my words around and try to convince the first person who heard them that they were real. So when I told someone I loved them, I truly meant it. The first people I told that I loved them were my family, and I still do love them; I have no choice but to love them. The blood that runs through their veins is the same blood that runs through mine, but everyone else has the option for me not to love them. They have the freewill to say anything and decide if they mean it or not, and they decide when they will stop believing in it or not. They can easily wake up one morning and decide that they never loved me because as far as I know you either love someone or you never did—there is no “I used to” in this situation.

Three simple words made up of eight letters holds meaning to every single person in the world, a meaning that is different for everyone. If you look up the definition of love, then the first thing you will see is love being defined as an intense feeling of deep affection. How are you supposed to exactly know when that deep connection is love? So many people say they love someone and when you do, that you’ll just know but so many people have been wrong before. I mean I’ll be completely honest my favorite types of movies are the corny relationship movies, where they are bestfriends and both have a huge crush on eachother but always say they don’t want to ruin the friendship but in the end they always end up together. I mean there is just something about a happy ending where they finally get their true love, but it’s unrealistic.

Well, of course it’s unrealistic, it’s a movie, but it’s more than that. I’ve seen words hold people together and then rip them apart. I’ve seen what “love” can do to someone. Scratch that—I’ve seen what people can do to another person and use the excuse of love for the reason they did it. I’ve been there to try and put the pieces back together when what people call love, fails. Love can’t be defined; love is made up. Love is backed by words that don’t mean anything. It is a deep connection that causes pain, that’s why I don’t believe in love- because a four letter word shouldn’t have the power to make you happy or sad, and it shouldn’t be based on something that you can’t measure. I don’t believe in love for two simple reasons, one of them being that there isn’t a science to love. I can’t take a test and have the results tell me that it’s love and the other reason being people can’t be answers they simply just make more questions.